[Info-vax] VAX Macro to C conversion

[andrew at feeandl.com]

On Monday, June 24, 2019 at 12:55:40 PM UTC+10, Robert A. Brooks wrote:
> 
> Never heard of the tool.
> 

See the link from Ben below, that's the tool I was talking about.


> How much carnal knowledge of the calling standard does your code have?
> 

Very good question. 
Still getting my head around it all after only a few short months here so unable to provide a definitive answer, but I take your point. Depending on how MACROy our code is, simply "translating" it to another language could be anywhere between "relatively straightforward" to "simply not gonna happen". My gut tells me that it ought to lean more towards the "relatively straightforward" end of the spectrum - although, having said that, our program pretty much runs 100% in memory due to some extremely tight timing requirements (no dbs or file i/o for us!!)  so its not beyond the realms of probability that there could be some hairy MACRO doing some of that.

> We (VSI VMS engineering) have MACRO code that we know would pretty much be 
> impossible to port to any other language (I'm thinking of the host-based 
> shadowing driver).  It would need to be a complete rewrite.
> 

I am pretty sure that's a realm that we don't need to get involved in - you guys can have that all to yourself!


> I suspect John Reagan will be by with more insightful (and likely inciteful)
> questions.

Bring it on JR !